OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Platform-Driven Collaboration Patterns: Structural Evolution Over Time and Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Within an increasingly digitalized organizational landscape, this research delves into the dynamics of decentralized collaboration, contrasting it with traditional collaboration models. An effective capturing of high-level collaborations (beyond direct massages) is introduced as the network construction methodology including both temporal and content dimensions of user collaborations - an Alternating Timed Interaction (ATI) metric as the first aspect, and a quantitative strategy of thematic similarity as the second aspect. This study validates three hypotheses that collectively underscore the complexities of digital team dynamics within sociotechnical systems: Firstly, it establishes the significant influence of problem context on team structures in work environments, emphasizing the need to consider the specific nature of tasks in analyzing collaborative dynamics. Secondly, the study reveals specific evolving patterns of team structures on digital platforms concerning team size and artifact maturity. Lastly, it identifies substantial differences in team structure patterns between digital platforms and traditional organizational settings, underscoring the unexplored nature of digital collaboration dynamics. The findings of this study are instrumental for organizations navigating the digital era, offering insights into effective knowledge sharing in the decentralized leadership of digital teams. By mapping out network structures and collaborative patterns, this study, with a focus on Wikipedia as a representative digital platform, paves the way for strategic interventions to optimize digital team dynamics and align them with broader organizational goals.
Weight Structure of Low/High-Rate Polar Codes and Its Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

The structure of a linear block code is pivotal in defining fundamental properties, particularly weight distribution, and code design. In this study, we characterize the Type II structure of polar codewords with weights less than twice the minimum weight $w_{min}$, utilizing the lower triangular affine (LTA) transform. We present a closed-form formula for their enumeration. Leveraging this structure and additionally characterizing the structure of weight $2w_{min}$, we ascertain the complete weight distribution of low-rate and, through the utilization of dual codes properties, high-rate polar codes, subcodes of Reed--Muller (RM) codes, and RMxPolar codes. Furthermore, we introduce a partial order based on the weight distribution and briefly explore its properties and applications in code construction and analysis.
UMBCLU at SemEval-2024 Task 1A and 1C: Semantic Textual Relatedness with and without machine translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The aim of SemEval-2024 Task 1, "Semantic Textual Relatedness for African and Asian Languages" is to develop models for identifying semantic textual relatedness (STR) between two sentences using multiple languages (14 African and Asian languages) and settings (supervised, unsupervised, and cross-lingual). Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on several natural language understanding tasks such as multilingual machine translation (MMT), semantic similarity (STS), and encoding sentence embeddings. Using a combination of LLMs that perform well on these tasks, we developed two STR models, $\textit{TranSem}$ and $\textit{FineSem}$, for the supervised and cross-lingual settings. We explore the effectiveness of several training methods and the usefulness of machine translation. We find that direct fine-tuning on the task is comparable to using sentence embeddings and translating to English leads to better performance for some languages. In the supervised setting, our model performance is better than the official baseline for 3 languages with the remaining 4 performing on par. In the cross-lingual setting, our model performance is better than the baseline for 3 languages (leading to $1^{st}$ place for Africaans and $2^{nd}$ place for Indonesian), is on par for 2 languages and performs poorly on the remaining 7 languages. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/dipta007/SemEval24-Task8.
DDC: A Vision for a Disaggregated Datacenter
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Datacenters of today have maintained the same architecture for decades using the server as the primary building block. However, this traditional approach suffers from under-utilization of its resources, often caused by over-allocating these resources when deploying applications to accommodate worst-case scenarios. Specifically, servers can quickly drain their over-allocated memory resources while their CPUs are not fully utilized. This problem gives rise to a different school of thought, where resources are disaggregated instead of tightly bound to servers. This can address the utilization problem by allowing each type of resource to be allocated, utilized and freed separately as required. New high performance communication protocols, like CXL, could pave the way for practical implementations of resource disaggregation. In this article, we argue it is time to reconsider the datacenter architecture as a whole. We present our vision for a disaggregated datacenter aided by well-established computer architecture design methodologies.
Towards Fair Allocation in Social Commerce Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Social commerce platforms are emerging businesses where producers sell products through re-sellers who advertise the products to other customers in their social network. Due to the increasing popularity of this business model, thousands of small producers and re-sellers are starting to depend on these platforms for their livelihood; thus, it is important to provide fair earning opportunities to them. The enormous product space in such platforms prohibits manual search, and motivates the need for recommendation algorithms to effectively allocate product exposure and, consequently, earning opportunities. In this work, we focus on the fairness of such allocations in social commerce platforms and formulate the problem of assigning products to re-sellers as a fair division problem with indivisible items under two-sided cardinality constraints, wherein each product must be given to at least a certain number of re-sellers and each re-seller must get a certain number of products. Our work systematically explores various well-studied benchmarks of fairness -- including Nash social welfare, envy-freeness up to one item (EF1), and equitability up to one item (EQ1) -- from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. We find that the existential and computational guarantees of these concepts known from the unconstrained setting do not extend to our constrained model. To address this limitation, we develop a mixed-integer linear program and other scalable heuristics that provide near-optimal approximation of Nash social welfare in simulated and real social commerce datasets. Overall, our work takes the first step towards achieving provable fairness alongside reasonable revenue guarantees on social commerce platforms.
From Movements to Metrics: Evaluating Explainable AI Methods in Skeleton-Based Human Activity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The advancement of deep learning in human activity recognition (HAR) using 3D skeleton data is critical for applications in healthcare, security, sports, and human-computer interaction. This paper tackles a well-known gap in the field, which is the lack of testing in the applicability and reliability of XAI evaluation metrics in the skeleton-based HAR domain. We have tested established XAI metrics namely faithfulness and stability on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) to address this problem. The study also introduces a perturbation method that respects human biomechanical constraints to ensure realistic variations in human movement. Our findings indicate that \textit{faithfulness} may not be a reliable metric in certain contexts, such as with the EfficientGCN model. Conversely, stability emerges as a more dependable metric when there is slight input data perturbations. CAM and Grad-CAM are also found to produce almost identical explanations, leading to very similar XAI metric performance. This calls for the need for more diversified metrics and new XAI methods applied in skeleton-based HAR.
Identifying Factual Inconsistencies in Summaries: Grounding LLM Inference via Task Taxonomy
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Factual inconsistencies pose a significant hurdle for the faithful summarization by generative models. While a major direction to enhance inconsistency detection is to derive stronger Natural Language Inference (NLI) models, we propose an orthogonal aspect that underscores the importance of incorporating task-specific taxonomy into the inference. To this end, we consolidate key error types of inconsistent facts in summaries, and incorporate them to facilitate both the zero-shot and supervised paradigms of LLMs. Extensive experiments on ten datasets of five distinct domains suggest that, zero-shot LLM inference could benefit from the explicit solution space depicted by the error type taxonomy, and achieves state-of-the-art performance overall, surpassing specialized non-LLM baselines, as well as recent LLM baselines. We further distill models that fuse the taxonomy into parameters through our designed prompt completions and supervised training strategies, efficiently substituting state-of-the-art zero-shot inference with much larger LLMs.
A Novel Protocol Using Captive Portals for FIDO2 Network Authentication
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

FIDO2 authentication is starting to be applied in numerous web authentication services, aiming to replace passwords and their known vulnerabilities. However, this new authentication method has not been integrated yet with network authentication systems. In this paper, we introduce FIDO2CAP: FIDO2 Captive-portal Authentication Protocol. Our proposal describes a novel protocol for captive-portal network authentication using FIDO2 authenticators, as security keys and passkeys. For validating our proposal, we have developed a prototype of FIDO2CAP authentication in a mock scenario. Using this prototype, we performed an usability experiment with 15 real users. This work makes the first systematic approach for adapting network authentication to the new authentication paradigm relying on FIDO2 authentication.
BFT-DSN: A Byzantine Fault Tolerant Decentralized Storage Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

With the rapid development of blockchain and its applications, the amount of data stored on decentralized storage networks (DSNs) has grown exponentially. DSNs bring together affordable storage resources from around the world to provide robust, decentralized storage services for tens of thousands of decentralized applications (dApps). However, existing DSNs do not offer verifiability when implementing erasure coding for redundant storage, making them vulnerable to Byzantine encoders. Additionally, there is a lack of Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus for optimal resilience in DSNs. This paper introduces BFT-DSN, a Byzantine fault-tolerant decentralized storage network designed to address these challenges. BFT-DSN combines storage-weighted BFT consensus with erasure coding and incorporates homomorphic fingerprints and weighted threshold signatures for decentralized verification. The implementation of BFT-DSN demonstrates its comparable performance in terms of storage cost and latency as well as superior performance in Byzantine resilience when compared to existing industrial decentralized storage networks.
Mind the Exit Pupil Gap: Revisiting the Intrinsics of a Standard Plenoptic Camera
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Among the common applications of plenoptic cameras are depth reconstruction and post-shot refocusing. These require a calibration relating the camera-side light field to that of the scene. Numerous methods with this goal have been developed based on thin lens models for the plenoptic camera's main lens and microlenses. Our work addresses the often-overlooked role of the main lens exit pupil in these models and specifically in the decoding process of standard plenoptic camera (SPC) images. We formally deduce the connection between the refocusing distance and the resampling parameter for the decoded light field and provide an analysis of the errors that arise when the exit pupil is not considered. In addition, previous work is revisited with respect to the exit pupil's role and all theoretical results are validated through a ray-tracing-based simulation. With the public release of the evaluated SPC designs alongside our simulation and experimental data we aim to contribute to a more accurate and nuanced understanding of plenoptic camera optics.
Large Language Model-based Human-Agent Collaboration for Complex Task Solving
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In recent developments within the research community, the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in creating fully autonomous agents has garnered significant interest. Despite this, LLM-based agents frequently demonstrate notable shortcomings in adjusting to dynamic environments and fully grasping human needs. In this work, we introduce the problem of LLM-based human-agent collaboration for complex task-solving, exploring their synergistic potential. In addition, we propose a Reinforcement Learning-based Human-Agent Collaboration method, ReHAC. This approach includes a policy model designed to determine the most opportune stages for human intervention within the task-solving process. We construct a human-agent collaboration dataset to train this policy model in an offline reinforcement learning environment. Our validation tests confirm the model's effectiveness. The results demonstrate that the synergistic efforts of humans and LLM-based agents significantly improve performance in complex tasks, primarily through well-planned, limited human intervention. Datasets and code are available at: https://github.com/XueyangFeng/ReHAC.
Data Pipeline Training: Integrating AutoML to Optimize the Data Flow of Machine Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Data Pipeline plays an indispensable role in tasks such as modeling machine learning and developing data products. With the increasing diversification and complexity of Data sources, as well as the rapid growth of data volumes, building an efficient Data Pipeline has become crucial for improving work efficiency and solving complex problems. This paper focuses on exploring how to optimize data flow through automated machine learning methods by integrating AutoML with Data Pipeline. We will discuss how to leverage AutoML technology to enhance the intelligence of Data Pipeline, thereby achieving better results in machine learning tasks. By delving into the automation and optimization of Data flows, we uncover key strategies for constructing efficient data pipelines that can adapt to the ever-changing data landscape. This not only accelerates the modeling process but also provides innovative solutions to complex problems, enabling more significant outcomes in increasingly intricate data domains. Keywords- Data Pipeline Training;AutoML; Data environment; Machine learning
QuanTest: Entanglement-Guided Testing of Quantum Neural Network Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Quantum Neural Network (QNN) combines the Deep Learning (DL) principle with the fundamental theory of quantum mechanics to achieve machine learning tasks with quantum acceleration. Recently, QNN systems have been found to manifest robustness issues similar to classical DL systems. There is an urgent need for ways to test their correctness and security. However, QNN systems differ significantly from traditional quantum software and classical DL systems, posing critical challenges for QNN testing. These challenges include the inapplicability of traditional quantum software testing methods to QNN systems due to differences in programming paradigms and decision logic representations, the dependence of quantum test sample generation on perturbation operators, and the absence of effective information in quantum neurons. In this paper, we propose QuanTest, a quantum entanglement-guided adversarial testing framework to uncover potential erroneous behaviors in QNN systems. We design a quantum entanglement adequacy criterion to quantify the entanglement acquired by the input quantum states from the QNN system, along with two similarity metrics to measure the proximity of generated quantum adversarial examples to the original inputs. Subsequently, QuanTest formulates the problem of generating test inputs that maximize the quantum entanglement adequacy and capture incorrect behaviors of the QNN system as a joint optimization problem and solves it in a gradient-based manner to generate quantum adversarial examples. results demonstrate that QuanTest possesses the capability to capture erroneous behaviors in QNN systems. The entanglement-guided approach proves effective in adversarial testing, generating more adversarial examples.
MapTrack: Tracking in the Map
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) aims to maintain stable and uninterrupted trajectories for each target. Most state-of-the-art approaches first detect objects in each frame and then implement data association between new detections and existing tracks using motion models and appearance similarities. Despite achieving satisfactory results, occlusion and crowds can easily lead to missing and distorted detections, followed by missing and false associations. In this paper, we first revisit the classic tracker DeepSORT, enhancing its robustness over crowds and occlusion significantly by placing greater trust in predictions when detections are unavailable or of low quality in crowded and occluded scenes. Specifically, we propose a new framework comprising of three lightweight and plug-and-play algorithms: the probability map, the prediction map, and the covariance adaptive Kalman filter. The probability map identifies whether undetected objects have genuinely disappeared from view (e.g., out of the image or entered a building) or are only temporarily undetected due to occlusion or other reasons. Trajectories of undetected targets that are still within the probability map are extended by state estimations directly. The prediction map determines whether an object is in a crowd, and we prioritize state estimations over observations when severe deformation of observations occurs, accomplished through the covariance adaptive Kalman filter. The proposed method, named MapTrack, achieves state-of-the-art results on popular multi-object tracking benchmarks such as MOT17 and MOT20. Despite its superior performance, our method remains simple, online, and real-time. The code will be open-sourced later.
GlórIA -- A Generative and Open Large Language Model for Portuguese
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Significant strides have been made in natural language tasks, largely attributed to the emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs). These models, pre-trained on extensive and diverse corpora, have become increasingly capable of comprehending the intricacies of language. Despite the abundance of LLMs for many high-resource languages, the availability of such models remains limited for European Portuguese. We introduce GlórIA, a robust European Portuguese decoder LLM. To pre-train GlórIA, we assembled a comprehensive PT-PT text corpus comprising 35 billion tokens from various sources. We present our pre-training methodology, followed by an assessment of the model's effectiveness on multiple downstream tasks. Additionally, to evaluate our models' language modeling capabilities, we introduce CALAME-PT (Context-Aware LAnguage Modeling Evaluation for Portuguese), the first Portuguese zero-shot language-modeling benchmark. Evaluation shows that GlórIA significantly outperforms existing open PT decoder models in language modeling and that it can generate sound, knowledge-rich, and coherent PT-PT text. The model also exhibits strong potential for various downstream tasks.
Visual Style Prompting with Swapping Self-Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In the evolving domain of text-to-image generation, diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools in content creation. Despite their remarkable capability, existing models still face challenges in achieving controlled generation with a consistent style, requiring costly fine-tuning or often inadequately transferring the visual elements due to content leakage. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach, \ours, to produce a diverse range of images while maintaining specific style elements and nuances. During the denoising process, we keep the query from original features while swapping the key and value with those from reference features in the late self-attention layers. This approach allows for the visual style prompting without any fine-tuning, ensuring that generated images maintain a faithful style. Through extensive evaluation across various styles and text prompts, our method demonstrates superiority over existing approaches, best reflecting the style of the references and ensuring that resulting images match the text prompts most accurately. Our project page is available https://curryjung.github.io/VisualStylePrompt/.
Towards Robust Graph Incremental Learning on Evolving Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Incremental learning is a machine learning approach that involves training a model on a sequence of tasks, rather than all tasks at once. This ability to learn incrementally from a stream of tasks is crucial for many real-world applications. However, incremental learning is a challenging problem on graph-structured data, as many graph-related problems involve prediction tasks for each individual node, known as Node-wise Graph Incremental Learning (NGIL). This introduces non-independent and non-identically distributed characteristics in the sample data generation process, making it difficult to maintain the performance of the model as new tasks are added. In this paper, we focus on the inductive NGIL problem, which accounts for the evolution of graph structure (structural shift) induced by emerging tasks. We provide a formal formulation and analysis of the problem, and propose a novel regularization-based technique called Structural-Shift-Risk-Mitigation (SSRM) to mitigate the impact of the structural shift on catastrophic forgetting of the inductive NGIL problem. We show that the structural shift can lead to a shift in the input distribution for the existing tasks, and further lead to an increased risk of catastrophic forgetting. Through comprehensive empirical studies with several benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed method, Structural-Shift-Risk-Mitigation (SSRM), is flexible and easy to adapt to improve the performance of state-of-the-art GNN incremental learning frameworks in the inductive setting.
TRAP: Targeted Random Adversarial Prompt Honeypot for Black-Box Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Model (LLM) services and models often come with legal rules on who can use them and how they must use them. Assessing the compliance of the released LLMs is crucial, as these rules protect the interests of the LLM contributor and prevent misuse. In this context, we describe the novel fingerprinting problem of Black-box Identity Verification (BBIV). The goal is to determine whether a third-party application uses a certain LLM through its chat function. We propose a method called Targeted Random Adversarial Prompt (TRAP) that identifies the specific LLM in use. We repurpose adversarial suffixes, originally proposed for jailbreaking, to get a pre-defined answer from the target LLM, while other models give random answers. TRAP detects the target LLMs with over 95% true positive rate at under 0.2% false positive rate even after a single interaction. TRAP remains effective even if the LLM has minor changes that do not significantly alter the original function.